The figure hiding behind the red leather trunk, finding it easier to breathe quietly now that the initial thrill of invasion was over, spent several minutes trying to figure out what was happening. The noises sounded somehow familiar, but what were they exactly? A little click, then a louder noise that sounded like metal and something. Then after what seemed like a long time, a proud voice shouted that it was the champion golfer. Oh, he was knocking golf balls into a tin. Stupid, really. No kind of fun. But the noises stopped. Now what was he doing?
The Master of the Room had looked under the big chair to find a ball that had missed the tin, and found his slingshot instead. Oh, that’s where it had been hiding! Jolly good! Now, where had he put the pebbles he’d collected for it last month? He’d wrapped them in a handkerchief, and he’d put the handkerchief . . . in the bottom drawer of the dresser, he thought. Yes, there it was! He grabbed the grimy white bundle that scrunched in his hand, scooped up the slingshot from the chair where he’d dropped it, and trotted back to his favorite windowsill.
Having scrambled up onto the sill, he stood facing the moat while he struggled to untie the knot in the handkerchief. His supplanter, bored with sitting silent and undiscovered, peered from behind the red leather trunk.
Up on the windowsill the handkerchief had yielded up its store of small stones. Fingering them thoughtfully, he looked out over the moat. He hadn’t a hope of hitting the far bank, of course. But he could see how far out into the water he could get a pebble. Carefully he chose his first missile: smooth, brown, the largest of the lot. Could he get it halfway across? He drew back the sling as far as he could and let go. There was a small ploop and a widening ring of ripples out on the water. Rats! Not nearly halfway. He wondered if a smaller stone might go farther. He pawed through the pebbles, looking for a likely candidate. But he never got to make his second shot.
Both literally and figuratively, he never knew what hit him.
Chapter 4
WEDNESDAY, THE DAY OF ROB HILLMAN’S DEATH
Close to Midnight
Detective Sergeant Meera Patel was feeling unusually useless. Unusually, because normally at this point in an investigation she was feeling like one of the best-oiled cogs in the machine. The machine itself might be plowing full steam ahead, or it might be floundering in the ditch, but Meera’s part in the investigation was, nearly always, operating at peak efficiency. Meera Patel was awfully good at her job. She knew it, and her sights were fixed unwaveringly on the advancement that was nothing less than her due. So when she felt useless, she also felt frustrated and therefore impatient. These emotions had to be kept under control, because they got in the way of her work.
Her job was Family Liaison, which meant that in a homicide investigation she was the officer in charge of dealing directly with the victim’s family. She was the sympathetic face of the police force. While other faces, solemn and dispassionate, asked endless boring, pointless, or painful questions, probed and pondered, made notes, and went away again, Meera Patel actually answered questions. The grieving widow, the bewildered child, the parent stunned into incoherency found in Meera an invaluable ally. Here was somebody who understood how they felt, and moreover, understood what was going on in the abruptly alien space that had been, until hours or days ago, their normal lives. They trusted her. Frequently they poured out their hearts to her.
Their willingness to do so was created not only by the Detective Sergeant’s compassionate attitude but by her appearance. Central Casting, asked to provide a convincing policewoman, would never have sent over anybody remotely resembling Meera Patel. She stood a reasonable five feet five inches in her stocking feet, but her slender figure and delicate head made her look petite, even fragile. The raven hair, worn in a neat, chin-length crop, framed a perfect Asian face: huge dark eyes, olive skin, sensuous mouth. She looked as sturdy as porcelain and as dangerous as a bunny rabbit, and the last two-hundred-and-twenty-pound villain who had taken her at face value had spent three days in the hospital on his way to prison. In the department she was referred to—cautiously, behind her back—as the Bengal Tidbit.
Meera, whose self-awareness was matched by her appreciation of irony, relished the contrast between her appearance and her abilities. Besides, a disarming front was much more useful to a Family Liaison officer than a formidable presence would have been. Many a distraught relative, after stammering broken, useless answers to the official questioners, turned voluble when Meera was the only police officer in the room. This was useful for two reasons: the families got to dump some of their intolerable emotional burden, and Meera picked up a fair amount of information that no formal interview could ever have elicited.
Meera was scrupulous never to abuse this trust. The ethics of Family Liaison were stern, and Meera clove to them, letter and spirit. She always reminded the family, carefully and specifically, that she was a police officer, and that although they could get as comfortable with her as they wanted to—Call her Meera? Certainly!—they must never forget that anything they told her that might assist the investigation would be passed on to her fellow officers. This rarely stopped the flow of confidences, however, because normally the family was every bit as anxious to find the perpetrator as the police were.
But this time it was different. For one thing, there wasn’t a family—or at least, it wasn’t the victim’s family. The victim was American, and his parents, apparently too traumatized to essay a transatlantic flight, had deputed the victim’s cousin, who was bound for England that week anyway, to come to Datchworth Castle, or at least to the nearby village of Wallwood, as proxy for her bereaved aunt and uncle. This woman—an Anglican priest, Meera had noted with interest—had yet to arrive, although she was expected on Saturday.
Meanwhile, what Meera had on her hands was the Family. She had been at Datchworth Castle only a couple of hours when she noticed that she had begun, in her mind, to assign a capital “F” to the word: her acute ear had picked it up from the staff and servants. Servants, for heaven’s sake! She felt as though she had stepped into a costume drama, only without the costumes. There was even a butler, who probably rated a capital letter, too: the Butler.
He had been standing on the front stoop as their cars had crunched across the gravel of the drive onto the paved area by the front door. The door was a massive affair of wood and iron, living up to the crenellated tower that rose above it to the height of five stories. The honey-colored stone, perforated here and there with arrow-slit windows, was smooth and unpocked by the weapons of long-dead enemies, and the tower exhibited that story-book perfection which tells the initiated eye that the building in question does not possess that medievality to which it pretends. Most of the police personnel climbing out of their cars, having spent years in and around that open-air museum of architecture which is the city of Oxford, pegged the entrance tower at a glance as Victorian.
But the man at the foot of it was the Real Thing. He was perhaps in his late forties, stocky but not flabby, of average height with a face containing no remarkable features and wearing a gray suit of utterly forgettable blandness. The moment he spoke, however, the mild stir of arrival stilled: every cop there instinctively recognized a voice that was accustomed to being listened to.
He said impassively, “Good afternoon. Sir Gregory is in the library; I will take you to him”—here the man’s eyes turned unerringly to Chief Inspector Lamp, the senior investigating officer—“as soon as his physician feels it is safe for him to see you. I am Crumper, Sir Gregory’s butler. The body is in the side drive”—Crumper made a small efficient gesture to his left—“where it is being watched by our local constable. Prior to the constable’s arrival I stationed three members of the staff around the area so that it would not be disturbed. The young man who discovered the body is in the front hall, waiting to answer your questions. A room on the ground floor has been set aside for your use.”
No doubt about it, the butler was impressive. But he was one of the principle reasons Meera was feeling
useless. Or perhaps it was merely that the uselessness came into sharper focus when she spoke to Crumper. Not that the butler wasn’t cooperating; Crumper was the soul of cooperation. Not that he wasn’t pleasant; he smiled at her in an avuncular fashion whenever he brought her tea, and having discovered her preference in that matter, made certain that the kitchen supplied her with Darjeeling rather than the Earl Grey which was brought to Chief Inspector Lamp.
But there was a wall there. It was invisible, like those force fields you saw in sci-fi series on the telly, but it was an impassable barrier. Meera and all her colleagues were on one side, and Crumper, polite and untouchable, stood on the other. No, Meera decided, that wasn’t quite accurate. Crumper himself was the wall, standing between her and the Family, between her and the entire household. He was Datchworth Castle’s defending army, entire in the body of one man.
At first they had thought Crumper was going to be their ally. When he had telephoned 999 he had said, “There’s been a death, a sudden death. It may not have been an accident.” Since it often was tricky, to say the least, to break the news to a shocked household that what they were assuming was an accidental death was in fact a homicide, it was a small but welcome relief to find that here this bridge had already been crossed.
“First of all, Mr. Crumper,” Chief Inspector Lamp began with a faint, official smile, “I want to say that you’ve handled this situation quite well.”
Crumper nodded as though Lamp had done nothing more than state the obvious, and murmured an uneffusive “Thank you, sir.”
They were sitting in the parlor favored by Sir Gregory’s late wife. Crumper had caused a library table and chairs to be installed in the area where the light was best, and for good measure had arranged for the presence of a miscellany of cords and cables, ready to receive the plugs of telephones, computers, or whatever other machinery might be deemed essential to the modern crime fighter. All this had occurred before they arrived.
“Can you tell me,” Lamp continued smoothly, “why the broken cup was removed from the scene, and yet afterward you went to a great deal of trouble to see that nothing else was disturbed?”
“Certainly, sir. As you have spoken with young Donovan already, I assume he told you that it was he who picked up the pieces of the cup. He told me that he did it without thinking. I presume it was a result of his shock at finding Mr. Hillman dead. When Donovan came to me, he was stammering, unable to speak clearly. He held out the pieces of the cup to me and I took them. I saw that the cup was one of the set that was used for Mr. Hillman’s tea, and we had been looking for Mr. Hillman for an hour without success. I assumed at that point that there had been an accident, a serious one, to judge from the lad’s behavior. But when he led me around to the west side of the house and I saw, ah, what had happened, I thought it might not be an accident. So I made arrangements for the area to be watched by three different members of the staff whilst I rang for help.”
Lamp tapped gently on the table with the well-sharpened tip of a yellow pencil. “So, you think Robert Hillman was, what? A likely candidate for suicide? Or homicide?
Crumper’s eyebrows rose half an inch, in an expression equally compounded of surprise and disapproval. “Neither, sir.”
“Then why were you so quick to assume that he didn’t just fall off the, um, that walkway along the edge of the roof?”
“Mr. Hillman was lying facedown. He was wearing shorts. On the back of his right calf there was a dark stain that I took to be blood. Resting against it was a large stone from the crenellations on the parapet above. The stone had a similar stain.”
There was a brief silence. These observations had, of course, been made by everyone from the village P.C. to Lamp himself. The Chief Inspector pursed and unpursed his lips. “But doesn’t that suggest an accidental fall? He leans on one of the stones, looking out at the view, stone comes loose, bloke looses his balance, they both fall, man and rock. Stone lands on his leg.” Lamp knew it wasn’t right, but he wanted to see what the butler was made of.
He found out. Crumper said calmly, “If that were the way of it, sir, the man would fall on the rock, not the rock on the man. Besides, the stain was relatively small. That suggests that Mr. Hillman’s blood had already stopped flowing when the stone struck his leg.”
Lamp smiled. “Ever thought of joining the C.I.D., Mr. Crumper?”
“No, sir,” Crumper replied without returning so much as a hint of a smile.
Lamp perceived that the butler was impervious to flattery. Well, that was all right. They wouldn’t need to cajole the facts out of him; it was clear that the man was going to be forthright with them.
Twenty minutes later, Lamp was less confident of Crumper’s cooperation. Crumper had no idea who had killed Mr. Hillman, and no idea who might have wanted to kill him. Mr. Hillman had no enemies that Crumper knew of. Certainly no one in the household had the slightest reason to want him dead. Everyone there liked him; Mr. Hillman had been, in fact, a very likable young man. No one in the household had known him longer than the few weeks he had spent at Datchworth, first during the Easter holidays, then the past two weeks. Except, of course, Miss Daventry; Mr. Hillman had been her tutor at Oxford.
“Were Miss Daventry and Mr. Hillman, ah, close?”
“No, sir.”
Lamp wondered how the butler, with no discernable alternation in expression, managed to cram into those two words half the disdain in the civilized world. Crumper might just as well have said, “If you expect me to encourage nasty insinuations about the Family I serve, you are as stupid as you are crass.”
The pattern continued. Crumper returned unhelpful but perfectly polite replies to all Lamp’s questions, until Lamp asked one that might remotely imply any untoward behavior, much less a motive for murder, among the residents of the household. Then the “No, sir” or the “I couldn’t say, sir” was tinged with implacable frost. The ice in the reply was so subtly conveyed, however, that it was impossible to accuse the butler of being either rude or unhelpful. Chief Inspector Lamp, not an arrogant man, knew that he had met his match. He decided he would let Meera Patel have a go at Crumper later, but he didn’t expect miracles, and he told her so.
Meera, meanwhile, had been attempting to make headway with the Family. Sir Gregory’s physician, whom Crumper had called immediately after summoning the police, had turned over his late afternoon appointments to his colleagues and made haste to Datchworth (there are some circumstances under which even the NHS makes house calls). Having arrived a scant two minutes before Chief Inspector Lamp and Company, he had temporarily denied access to Sir Gregory while he took the old man’s pulse and blood pressure and satisfied himself that his patient was somewhere this side of shock.
That left Meera talking to Meg Daventry. Meg was a pretty girl, eighteen or nineteen, Meera guessed, and Meg, not to put too fine a point on it, was in shreds.
“Oh God, oh God,” she wailed. “It’s my fault, it’s all my fault.”
This was a promising beginning; Meera could make herself well and truly useful to the bereaved and at the same time garner immediate information about what might have happened to Robert Hillman. But it emerged that all Meg Daventry meant in assuming the blame was that it was she who was responsible for getting the young American to the Castle in the first place.
The three and a half minutes Meera was allowed with Sir Gregory produced even less satisfaction. What she got was punctilious civility delivered in a shocked and shaken voice. She assured the Baronet that she would be there should he need to talk to someone about what was happening; he assured her that he would let her know should such a need arise. Recognizing her cue, she departed, resisting the fleeting urge to bow herself out. The doctor had been sitting ten feet away from Sir Gregory’s wheelchair throughout the brief conversation.
Shortly after eleven thirty P.M., Lamp convened a meeting in the parlor Crumper had allotted them. There the entire team compared notes, and it wasn’t happy hearing. The postmortem was no
t complete, but preliminary indications were, first, the deceased had died when he hit the ground, which nobody had doubted; second, the stone had landed on top of him very shortly after he died, which again nobody had doubted; and third, when examined at six thirty-five P.M., the body had been dead somewhere between one and two hours, which everybody knew already.
“I don’t think we can expect anything more from that department, frankly,” said Lamp. “So either Hillman jumped and somebody pushed the stone after him to make it look accidental, which doesn’t seem probable because why should anybody here cover it up if he committed suicide? And bedsides, everybody from the Baronet to the maid who took him his tea says he was in good spirits, no sign of trouble or depression, and again, why should everybody here lie about that? So I think we file ‘jumped.’ ” There were nods.
The Chief Inspector continued. “Next, did he fall? Anybody have a reasonable explanation for why somebody would push a stone after him?” Everybody shook their heads. “Which leaves us with the obvious. He was pushed, and the stone was pushed over afterward to give the idea that he fell because the stone gave way. Has anyone got anything at all that challenges that?” Again, heads shook unanimously.
“All right. Motive. Anybody got anything to offer, anything at all?”
Detective Inspector Griffin suggested, “The girl? Meg Daventry?” There were a few murmurs of assent.
“What about her?”
“Well, she’s the only one who’s really upset, and she’s more than upset, she’s hysterical. She keeps saying she’s the only reason Hillman was here. And she’s expressing remorse. Lover’s quarrel, maybe?”
Lamp looked at Meera. “What do you think?”
Meera had seen this question coming even before the meeting had started. “I think it’s the only possibility we’ve dug up so far.”
Lamp looked at her, waiting for more, but when all he got was a steady gaze from the big, dark eyes, he shrugged and turned back to Griffin. “All right, then. We’ll have a team—Duncan, Morrisey, you take the girl. Anybody else smell a motive? Anywhere?”
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